Lift Up Your Hearts!

I recently read the answers to a genealogist's request for people's "top three genealogical regrets," and discovered that I am not alone.  Hands down, the greatest frustration and sorrow reported was over not recording stories and asking questions of those who died taking irretrievable history with them.  I'm far from the only one who developed an interest in family history too late to get easy and accurate answers to the family mysteries that are now taking so much time and effort to unravel, and which may never be made clear.  From bare-facts birth, death, and marriage information, to photographs of people and places once dearly loved by those whose love made us what we are, to the unique, intimate, and irreplaceable stories of a family's daily lives, thoughts, feelings, and culture—these personal connections with history all too often mean little to the young, engrossed as they are in the here and now.

Even those fortunate young people who take an interest in their elders' tales are rarely forward-thinking enough to make sure the stories are recorded, nor do they often know at the age of 20 what questions they will wish answered when they are 50.  It must, therefore, be the responsibility of the older generation to assemble, record, and save what information they can, keeping it safe "against that day" when their children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren will be grateful for their efforts. (More)

Earlier this month the Seattle Times ran a heartwarming genealogy story by Jan Burak Schwert about her husband's accidental meeting, in a German pub, of a man who shared both his interest in genealogy and his great-great-grandfather.  The meeting itself was not planned, but the ground well-prepared, since they were in Germany, and that particular small town, searching for  information on his ancestors.  ("You fly down the street on a chance that you'll meet, And you meet—not really by chance.")  Despite the dilution of so many generations, the two looked like brothers.

I'm not likely to have such an experience in a small, foreign town, since I must go back one generation further still to find my first ancestor not born in this country, and I don't think anyone would look at me and say, "Irish."  Nonetheless there's something wonderful about connecting with long-lost relatives, even first cousins.  :)

Having been alerted to the Evangelical Manifesto by both GroshLink and John Stackhouse, I decided it was probably worth reading.  I generally shun labels other than "Christian," if I can, and "Manifesto" sounds a little radical to me, but there's a lot I can identify with in this document.  I greatly appreciate its even-handed, moderate, dare I say Christ-like approach. It may sound ho-hum to some, but I suspect that a clear and courteous statement of basic beliefs and principles is more necessary than we'd like to believe.  Others apparently read the Manifesto as a wimpy effort not to be identified with Fundamentalists, though what I see is not one-sided, but a true effort avoid both Scylla and Charybdis.

If Christians are to have any reasonable voice in the public square we need to get out from under stereotypes and "past watchful dragons." The Evangelical Manifesto seems to me to be a reasonable attempt so to do.

A friend of mine once lamented that at her church Mother's Day received more attention than Easter.  I'm sure most churches do better than that, but I'm equally sure that in many churches, at least in the United States, yesterday received more honor as Mother's Day than as Pentecost.  We celebrated both, making the Christian festival primary, but not disdaining the secular celebration.  I like the way our rector mitigates the other problem with Mother's Day celebrations, the pain they cause women suffering from infertility, by asking to stand first all great-grandmothers, then all grandmothers, then all mothers, then all daughters, till all the women of the congregation are standing, and all the men of the church pray for us.  Still, the main focus was Pentecost, and we even had a baptism to go with it.  We sang a lively and appropriate anthem by Pepper Choplin called Fill-a Me Up! for two services, though we sneaked out of the second service after the anthem to get in a few minutes of our Sunday school class.  Unfortunately, the anthem is sung after the sermon; good as the sermon was, I'd happily have skipped the second hearing to have attended more of the class, but the memory is still too strong of one occasion in which the normally long-winded preacher (in a different church) drastically and inexplicably cut short his sermon.  We didn't want to risk not returning in time. (More)

As my father would say, we were sloppin' up culture like a hawg yesterday.  (I believe the reference was to a L'il Abner comic strip, although it may have been Pogo.)  It all started when the Orlando Magic (local basketball team) advanced to the playoffs, thereby causing a parking problem for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra concert since the Bob Carr Auditorium and the O-rena (it keeps changing its name based on sponsorship, so since I can't keep track of it I generally call it by its original appellation) share parking facilities.

In order to help alleviate the problem, the OPO delayed its concert by half an hour.  We figured that still wasn't going to be good enough, since one never knows how long a basketball game is going to last, so we decided to expand the evening. (More)

The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen (Doubleday, 2007)

I'm finally reading the book I first wrote about a month an a half ago.  This post is no more a proper book review than the earlier one, since I'm only through the introduction and 3/4 of Chapter One.  I can feel Mr. Keen's keenly disapproving I Told You So look: yet another example of amateurs doing things badly.  So be it.  I just experienced a perfect example of why I have a problem with some of his assertions, and want to share it with you, my minuscule but beloved audience.   Otherwise, distracted amateur that I am, I'd probably forget the illustration before finishing the book.

While I am reading The Cult of the Amateur, Porter is enjoying a G. A. Henty novel, In the Reign of Terror, and tonight he came upon a word with which he was unfamiliar:  louvetier.  Naturally, he asked me about it, since for years I have been the family's reference-book-of-choice.  If Mom doesn't know, she'll look it up and save the rest of us the trouble.  Well, I didn't know, so I went to my handy dictionary.  This is no pocket-sized or student edition, but a thick, heavy Webster's with its own dictionary stand—but it failed me.  On to the next room, and my online references.  BabelFish: No.  Answers.com: No.  Merriam-Webster:  No.  Encyclopedia Britannica, surely:  Not at all.  Yet the combination of Google and Wikipedia, very much maligned in that first chapter I had been reading when Porter's question interrupted me, gave me the answer in a matter of seconds.  I should have tried them first, but I was under the influence of the book.  A louvetier, for those of you who are panting to know, is a French wolfcatcher, master of the wolfhounds and responsible for organizing the wolf hunts.  Wikipedia may indeed be amateurish and prone to bias and error, but it answered the question swiftly and—confirmed by Porter from the context of the book—accurately.

More to come.  I can see there is more to appreciate about Keen's insights than I was expecting, as well as plenty with which to disagree.

Today's NEHGS eNews includes the following lovely passage written on July 4, 1632 by New England Puritan leader John Winthrop. (The website version the eNews link will take you to is currently a few issues behind, but will eventually catch up to the one to which I refer, which is Vol. 10, No. 19).

I have much difficulty to keep John Galloppe here by reason his wife will not come [to the New England colony]. I marvel at the woman’s weakness that she will live miserably with her children there, when she might live comfortably here with her husband. I pray persuade and further her coming by all means: if she will come let her have the remainder of his wages, if not, let it be bestowed to bring over his children, for so he desires: it would be above £40 loss for him to come for her.

Say what you want about the difficulties of family separation, and the desirability of reunion, and I will agree with you.  But I marvel at the arrogance, duplicity, bullying, and blackmail from a leader who was loved and respected by so many.  (Actually, it reminds me of a modern-day religous leader some of us know. Let the reader understand.  Perhaps more strong, innovative leaders than we'd like to believe are a curious admixture of high intelligence, charismatic personality, stubborn will, and arrogant self-righteousness.)

I won't pretend anything other than a highly selfish interest in my dismay at the decision by the Catholic Church to forbid digitization of their parish records.  I disagree with the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), but genealogists and other historians owe them a great debt for the records they have kept and assembled over the years, records which they make freely available to people of all faiths.

Anyone who has tried to find their European ancestors knows that the parish baptismal records are critically important, often the only record of someone's birth.  This is not an issue of privacy concerns, as the records of interest are for several hundred years dead. (More)

Someone on one of my Internet forums alerted me to Rush, Little Baby, a Boston Globe article of a few months back.  As articles critical of academically-oriented education for young children, it's a pretty good one, covering many perspectives and giving fair space to the opposing view.

It's still frustrating. (More)

While chatting with the dental hygienist yesterday, I learned about a science project that had been assigned to her fifth-grade son: Each student was assigned a "body system"—perhaps circulatory, digestive, respiratory, etc.; I didn't get the details—and told to make up a game using questions about that system.  At first glance that seems reasonable, perhaps even interesting. Games are not a particularly efficient way to learn facts, but they can be an enjoyable way of masking the repetition that is required to commit them to memory.  Certainly making up the questions is a good exercise.

However, the amount of time and effort required for this project was 'way out of proportion to the science knowledge gained, most being devoted to extraneous matters:  the game must have a well-made game board, with a detailed, typed instruction sheet, and a sturdy, well-decorated box.  Such a project might be a joy for some students but torture for their less-crafty classmates—and to what purpose?  Whatever one might think of the merits of training fifth graders in manual dexterity and design, it seems unfair to base a science grade on such work, and in any case one ought not to pretend that it is science that is being taught.

This assignment is yet one more example of how those who claim they don't have enough time to teach properly waste the students' time with busywork.  Craft projects instead of science, PowerPoint presentations instead of written reports, browsing the Internet for images instead of writing paragraphs, and tweaking fonts and backgrounds instead of improving sentence structure!  It's bad enough when a teacher allows a student to get away with such nonsense; to require it is ludicrous.

My theory is that the teacher in question is using her students as slave labor to create classroom materials for future years, so I encouraged the hygienist to make sure the project comes home after it has been graded. 

The end month of Porter's recent gig was very stressful, with lots of pressure and 80+ hour work weeks.  My father often said that his favorite Bible quotation was "And it came to pass...."  This, too, has passed at last, and we have survived.  Many thanks to those of you who upheld Porter in your prayers.

If anyone wants a measure of how stressful the time was, I need only say that he has spent several days recently working on replacing a neighbor's roof, and some of you remember that two years ago—after replacing ours—he said he'd never, ever do that again. But this is how he chooses to relax these days, finding the physical work a delightful change.

So, onward!  Two days in Roanoke, then who knows?  It's always an adventure. 

Picture this:  During the upcoming Olympics, the second place finisher of a big race suddenly collapses and dies.  Nonetheless, the crowd still celebrates with the winner, and the medal ceremony takes place as if nothing had happened.  It's a tragedy, sure, but that's life, that's sport, and nothing should take away from the winner's glory.

That's not as far-fetched as it might seem.  We don't like to rain on anyone's parade.  No one seems anxious to boycott this year's Olympics, despite China's blatant and unrepentant violation of human rights and international law.  We don't want to hurt our athletes, and that's understandable.  Still, there was a time when celebrations were set aside in the face of tragedy, such as the wedding of my mother's cousin, for which, as the newspaper announcement put it, "nuptials were quiet owing to the late bereavement in the home."

Horses are not people, but the death of Eight Belles, the brave filly who finished second in today's running of the Kentucky Derby, then collapsed with two compound fractures of her front legs and had to be euthanized immediately, will put a damper on the post-race celebrations.  Or at least it should.

When I was in Pittsburgh, we bought some dried pineapple at Trader Joe's, and it was very, very good!  Thus when I saw the same at my local health food store, I snapped it up.  Did I say it was the same?  Not.  Even thought the label did not mention added sugar, this pineapple must have been sweetened, as is the dried pineapple I can buy at the grocery store.  Yuck.  I couldn't eat it, so I cooked it with some dried apricots to make a fruit topping for my breafast muesli.

Not to be defeated, however, I set about making my own dried pineapple out of canned pieces (rings work best) heated in a low-temperature oven.  Voila!  Wonderful!  Delicious!  The only trouble is that a can of pineapple shrinks to something so small—and so tasty—one could easily devour an entire batch in one sitting.  (One didn't, but it was a close thing.)

The acoustics in our house are such that the sound from the television is loudest in every room except the one in which the TV resides.  Perhaps that is not literally true, but to those trying to work or sleep while someone else watches television, it certainly seems that way.  Hence our joy when Porter's "thank you award" came from IBM:  a set of wireless headphones.

Fortunately, there was no need to understand in detail the instructions, which contained several gems.

This wireless headphone is worked based on optical-electricity transition.

Well, of course.  What else would it be worked based on?

Thanks to Tim at Random Observations for alerting me to this interesting commentary on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.  The book and the movie derived from it have formed our national image of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.  The trouble is, that's a false impression.  Like Amadeus and Braveheart, The Grapes of Wrath tells a good story based on historical events, but without letting the truth get in the way of the narrative.

Someone with a solid knowledge of the historical situation might be able to imbibe the story without harm, but the rest of us, unfortunately the majority, are learning history through these media, and learning it wrong.  We're left with a mish-mash of fact and fiction we may never sort out, and upon which we will unconsiously base our philosophical, political, social, and moral decisions.

Whoever said (I've seen various attributions), "Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws," might just as well have been speaking about its popular books, television shows, and movies.  The only antidote besides a healthy (uncynical) skepticism is a solid grounding in history, preferably from several viewpoints.  Mea culpa; my own knowledge of history is abysmal, and I did not do much to help our children achieve more.  But if I were designing a home eduation program now, the tripod on which I would rest the entire academic program, beginning from the earliest stages, would be: language, mathematics/logic, and history.  Those who are strong in these three areas will not easily be duped.